Let’s Be Friends

Two Presidents find a mutual advantage.

Why else would Obama spend hours on a golf course being lectured by Clinton?Credit Illustration by Andy Friedman

Barack Obama and Bill Clinton have never been close. Some of their advisers concede that the two men don’t really like each other. They have openly disagreed on policy issues and political strategy, and the acrimony generated during the 2008 Democratic primaries, when Hillary Clinton ran against Obama for the nomination, has yet to fully dissipate. Nevertheless, a carefully orchestrated reconciliation of sorts has been under way for some time now. The former Democratic President, long spurned by the current one, has been given a prominent speaking spot at the Convention, in Charlotte, the night before the President’s speech—a spot usually reserved for the Vice-President. Joe Biden was bumped to the following night, in the slot immediately before Obama.

The reconciliation began in earnest late last summer. Patrick Gaspard, the former White House political director, who has moved to the Democratic National Committee, approached Douglas Band, Clinton’s closest political adviser and longtime gatekeeper, with some suggestions about how the former President might help with Obama’s 2012 reëlection campaign. Band, who, by reputation, has an acute sense for moments of political advantage, tried to explain that you don’t just call up Bill Clinton and tell him to raise money and campaign for you. Band recommended that the two Presidents begin by playing golf. The next day, Obama phoned Clinton and invited him out for a round. Several Clinton associates say that this was the moment they realized that Obama truly wanted to win in 2012. Why else would he spend hours on a golf course being lectured by Clinton?

The Presidential round was played at Andrews Air Force Base on September 24, 2011, and since then Clinton has become a visible and vigorous champion of Obama’s reëlection. Clinton agreed to participate in several fund-raisers; he was in a documentary, released on March 15th, attesting to Obama’s sound judgment in ordering the raid on Osama bin Laden; and he recently appeared in an Obama campaign ad. “President Obama has a plan to rebuild America from the ground up,” Clinton says. “It only works if there is a strong middle class. That’s what happened when I was President. We need to keep going with his plan.” Behind the scenes, Clinton has been involved in detailed discussions about campaign strategy.

For Clinton, Obama’s solicitousness is a welcome affirmation of his legacy and, perhaps, an opportunity to boost his wife’s Presidential prospects. For Obama, the reconciliation could help him win in November. It’s also an ideological turnaround: Obama, who rose to the Oval Office in part by pitching himself as the antidote to Clintonism, is now presenting himself as its heir apparent. It’s a shrewd, even Clintonian, tactical maneuver.

The relationship between a sitting President and his living predecessors is rarely easy. According to “The Presidents Club,” by Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy, Lyndon Johnson sometimes drafted the popular former President Dwight D. Eisenhower into his publicity schemes, which frustrated Ike, who complained to aides about being used. After Johnson left office, Richard Nixon cultivated him carefully, even sending weekly national-security briefings to his ranch, in Stonewall, Texas, by government aircraft. It worked; Johnson, who was alienated from his party because of Vietnam, mostly kept quiet during Nixon’s 1972 reëlection campaign, against George McGovern. Ronald Reagan treated the recently disgraced Nixon with deference, which helped start Nixon’s late-career return to respectability, but the two men eventually fell out over Reagan’s Soviet policy. In 1989, George H. W. Bush recruited Jimmy Carter to help with policy toward Panama; that helped revive Carter’s reputation, but the relationship soured in 1991, when Carter tried to rally world leaders against Bush’s invasion of Iraq. When Carter attempted to offer advice at the start of Clinton’s Presidency, Clinton, with the Iraq incident fresh in memory, rebuffed him. Likewise, Obama, early in his term, ignored Clinton’s advice, which is said to have left Clinton feeling wounded.

Obama, throughout his career, has faced a challenge in how best to manage his political antecedent. Clinton is fifteen years Obama’s senior and was the dominant figure in Democratic politics during the years of his rise. Obama had graduated from Harvard Law School and moved back to Chicago in 1991, the year before Clinton was elected. He made his first mark on Chicago politics during the 1992 campaign, running a voter-registration drive that contributed to Clinton’s victory in Illinois—the first time that a Democratic Presidential nominee had won the state since 1964.

Yet Obama came to share an ambivalence toward Clinton’s policies that was common on the left. In 1996, Clinton, after vetoing two versions of controversial welfare-reform legislation, which he deemed too harsh, announced that he would sign the slightly modified third version. Obama, who was then practicing law at a firm well connected in progressive circles and lecturing at the University of Chicago, saw Clinton’s election-year decision as a sellout. He told one newspaper that he found it “disturbing.” Later, as an Illinois state senator, Obama said that he wouldn’t have supported Clinton’s welfare bill, and he helped pass a state law that restored benefits to legal immigrants, a group that Clinton’s policy had made ineligible.

In 2000, Obama’s political career was nearly derailed by Clinton. Obama was running against Bobby Rush, the incumbent congressman from the South Side of Chicago, in the Democratic primary. Rush had supported Clinton during his impeachment battle, and although Obama’s challenge was a long shot, Clinton helped insure Rush’s victory with an appearance in the district just a week before primary day. Obama was so shattered by the defeat that he considered giving up politics. “It’s impossible not to feel at some level as if you have been personally repudiated by the entire community,” he wrote subsequently, in his 2006 book, “The Audacity of Hope,” and that “everywhere you go, the word ‘loser’ is flashing through people’s minds.”

By 2004, when Obama ran for the U.S. Senate, he had softened his critique of Clinton and adopted a more centrist position. Clinton’s policies, derided by the left as triangulation, had been a necessary “correction” to the liberal excesses of the Democratic Party, Obama told me in April of that year. He was developing a new theme, which helped carry him to the White House, four years later: the obstacle wasn’t ideology but blind partisanship. The immediate target of the critique, unveiled during his famous speech at the 2004 Convention, was George W. Bush. But the argument could also be applied to the Clinton years, and it soon was. In a well-known remark in “The Audacity of Hope,” Obama dismissed the partisan wars of the Clinton and Bush years as a baby-boomer “psychodrama.”

As the 2008 Presidential campaign took shape, Obama emerged as the leader of a new, anti-Clinton wing. His “psychodrama” argument blossomed into a full-scale criticism of the Clinton Presidency. This time, though, the target was another Presidential aspirant, Hillary Clinton, who, Obama argued, was too polarizing to get anything done in Washington.

Obama soon added a harsher note to the argument: that Hillary, perhaps like her finger-wagging husband, was untrustworthy. On November 10, 2007, Obama’s advisers, in a private memo before a pivotal speech in Iowa, laid out the strategy. “Clinton,” they argued, “can’t be trusted or believed when it comes to change,” because “she’s driven by political calculation, not conviction.”

An Obama Presidency, the candidate suggested in 2007 and 2008, would be much bolder than Clinton’s. “If we are really serious about winning this election, Democrats, we can’t live in fear of losing it,” Obama declared in his Iowa speech, echoing the advice of his pollsters and strategists. “This party—the party of Jefferson and Jackson; of Roosevelt and Kennedy—has always made the biggest difference in the lives of the American people when we led, not by polls, but by principle; not by calculation, but by conviction.”

The Clinton circle blames Obama’s decision to go negative for the subsequent nastiness of the 2008 Democratic primaries. Bill Clinton fumed that the press failed to call out Obama for running on a message of hope and change while attacking Hillary as untrustworthy. In New Hampshire, on January 7th, he made his most famous remarks of the race, calling Obama’s record on Iraq “the biggest fairy tale I’ve ever seen!” He added, “The idea that one of these campaigns is positive and the other is negative, when I know the reverse is true and I have seen it and I have been blistered by it for months, is a little tough to take.” Clinton urged Hillary’s campaign to fire back, and, when it wouldn’t, at least to his satisfaction, he did so on his own.

The result was an internecine war that the two men have struggled to overcome. In South Carolina, Obama’s campaign suggested that Clinton’s “fairy tale” comment had racial overtones. (It was read as a subtle rejection of the idea that an African-American could become President.) A few days later, in Nevada, Obama compared Bill Clinton unfavorably to Ronald Reagan. “I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that, you know, Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not,” he said. No doubt the rhetoric was partly strategic. Every Presidential candidate must distinguish himself from his party’s previous President, especially if the predecessor’s spouse is an opposing candidate. But Clinton “didn’t see it as a tactic,” Mark Halperin and John Heilemann write in “Game Change,” their account of the 2008 race. “He thought that Obama might actually believe that Reagan’s tenure had been superior to his own.”

Bill Clinton’s attacks hurt Hillary as much as they did Obama. The Times denounced Clinton’s fairy-tale comment as a “bizarre and rambling attack” and as exemplifying a campaign that was “perilously close to injecting racial tension” into the conversation. At a press conference in South Carolina the morning after Obama won the state, Bill Clinton seemed to dismiss the victory as a fluke of local demography. “Jesse Jackson won South Carolina in ’84 and ’88,” he said. “Jackson ran a good campaign. And Obama ran a good campaign here.” Tim Russert told me that, according to his sources, Bill Clinton, in an effort to secure an endorsement for Hillary from Ted Kennedy, said to Kennedy, “A few years ago, this guy would have been carrying our bags.” Clinton’s role in the campaign rattled Obama. He told ABC News in an interview that Clinton “has taken his advocacy on behalf of his wife to a level that I think is pretty troubling.”

Obama’s victory in the primaries was hard for Bill Clinton to absorb. For the remainder of the 2008 election, contact between him and Obama was minimal: a quick phone call on the night Hillary conceded, a private meeting in Harlem, and a joint campaign rally in Florida to excite Democratic voters. In August, on the eve of the Convention, in Denver, Clinton gave an interview to ABC in which he refused to say whether he thought Obama was prepared to be Commander-in-Chief. But he rose to the occasion at the Convention, in remarks prepared without participation from the Obama campaign. “Barack Obama is ready to be President of the United States,” he said.

David Axelrod describes the Presidents’ relationship as improved. “Would I be truthful if I said to you that we went through a long and difficult campaign in 2007-08 and as soon as it was over the relationship was instantly close?” he said. “I mean, that just defies human nature. But I think it’s grown up over time.”

Regardless of Bill Clinton’s personal feelings about Obama, it didn’t take him long to see the advantages of an Obama Presidency. More than anyone, he pushed Hillary to take the job of Secretary of State. “President Clinton was a big supporter of the idea,” an intimate of the Clintons told me. “He advocated very strongly for it and arguably was the tie-breaking reason she took the job.” For one thing, having his spouse in that position didn’t hurt his work at the Clinton Global Initiative. He invites foreign leaders to the initiative’s annual meeting, and her prominence in the Administration can be an asset in attracting foreign donors. “Bill Clinton’s been able to continue to be the Bill Clinton we know, in large part because of his relationship with the White House and because his wife is the Secretary of State,” the Clinton associate continued. “It worked out very well for him. That may be a very cynical way to look at it, but that’s a fact. A lot of the stuff he’s doing internationally is aided by his level of access.”

Bill Clinton’s international diplomacy also has benefitted Obama, although the White House has been careful to control the spotlight. One rough moment occurred in 2009, when Clinton flew to North Korea to negotiate the release of two captive journalists, Euna Lee and Laura Ling. Ling’s sister Lisa had worked closely with Clinton and with the Obama Administration to obtain the women’s release. In the sisters’ subsequent memoir about the ordeal, “Somewhere Inside: One Sister’s Captivity in North Korea and the Other’s Fight to Bring Her Home,” they expressed surprise that Clinton wouldn’t be stepping off the plane with Lee and Ling as they greeted their families in front of reporters; the White House had asked him to remain on board. “We feel strongly about this decision,” Lisa was told in a conference call with a White House official. Once the plane was on the ground, however, a State Department aide assured her that Clinton would leave the plane with the former captives, and he did. Obama called Clinton a few minutes afterward and thanked him for the mission. It was the first time the two Presidents had spoken in quite a while, Lisa was told.

Throughout 2008 and 2009, Obama rarely contacted Clinton, a decision that the Clinton circle attributes to Obama’s loner personality. A Democrat deeply familiar with the relationship complained that the press has often made it seem that Clinton harbored “lingering resentments” from the primary battle: “It’s always sort of implied that it’s Clinton’s fault.” The truth, he added, “is that Obama doesn’t really like very many people.” He ticked off the names of some of Obama’s longtime friends: the Whitakers, the Nesbitts, Valerie Jarrett. “And he likes to talk about sports. But other than that he just doesn’t like very many people. Unfortunately, it extends to people who used to have his job.”

Aides in both camps continue to air old grievances. Clinton’s circle complains that for months the White House ignored a 2009 memo from Clinton about energy policy. When a meeting was arranged, on July 14, 2010, it turned out to be a perfunctory event with business leaders. The Obama side says that requests for help from Clinton always seemed to come with strings attached, and that Clinton sometimes seems intent on upstaging Obama. There was momentary panic at the White House when, in 2011, it was learned that Clinton was soon going to publish a book on policy. Former top Clinton aides who went to work for Obama were left feeling, as one of them put it, like children of divorce.

Still, a turning point came after the 2010 midterm elections. Obama had promised, during his campaign, to build a politics of consensus rather than of partisan conflict, but that approach wasn’t working against an increasingly right-wing Republican Party set on his defeat. Pollsters deemed Obama the most polarizing President in history, and he was rejected in 2010, much as Clinton had been in 1994. Meanwhile, the approval ratings for Clinton, who was focussed on international projects, had soared. The balance of power in the relationship began to shift as the Administration saw that enlisting Clinton might solve more than one problem.

In December, Obama negotiated a compromise tax deal with Republicans—a two-year extension of all the Bush-era tax cuts in return for some economic stimulus—that many House Democrats deplored. Liberals complained about the deal, much as Obama had criticized Clinton before 2008. What had happened to boldness? On December 10th, Clinton met alone with Obama in the Oval Office for seventy minutes, one of their longest sessions to date. Afterward, they sauntered into the briefing room, surprising reporters. Clinton gave a forceful defense of the tax deal, which helped quell the liberal uprising.

By early 2011, the White House was turning its attention to reëlection. Jim Messina, the deputy chief of staff, moved to Chicago to manage the campaign, and he took charge of the Clinton account. Messina hadn’t worked for Obama during the Democratic primaries in 2008 and had no interest in the old conflicts. “Jim Messina just cares about getting two hundred and seventy electoral votes—period,” the knowledgeable Democrat said. “And he knows Bill Clinton helps him along that path. He doesn’t care what he said in South Carolina in 2008.”

Clinton, Messina told me, is one of the few people who can make the case for Obama among voters who still haven’t made up their minds. “They’re looking at this through an economic framework, and he’s going to be incredibly important to that discussion,” Messina said. “He’s now effective with almost every demographic. I mean, he’s in the sixties now”—meaning that more than sixty per cent of Americans view him favorably. “The current two political figures in America who have those numbers are Bill Clinton and Michelle Obama.”

In November, not long after the round of golf, Messina and Axelrod made a pilgrimage to Clinton’s Harlem office. Messina brought a PowerPoint slide show and briefed the former President on campaign strategy. At the time, the Obama team was alternating between two arguments about Romney. One presented him as an inveterate flip-flopper, the other as a right-wing ideologue who would return the country to a pre-New Deal dystopia. Clinton advised them to stick with the second argument. It would help with fund-raising, he said; liberal donors would be more motivated to fight a fierce conservative. If they defined Romney as a flip-flopper, undecided voters might think that he could return to his moderate roots once he was in office. “They tried to do this to me, the flip-flopper thing,” Clinton said, according to someone in the room. “It just doesn’t work.” He told the Obama aides that voters never held the flip-flopper attacks against him because they felt that he would simply do what was right.

After Clinton agreed to appear at several fund-raisers, Obama turned him into a leading character in his stump speech. “All we’re asking is that we go back to the same tax rates that we paid under Bill Clinton,” Obama said in Boone, Iowa, recently, using a line that he repeats in most campaign speeches these days. “And you know what? That was a time when our economy created nearly twenty-three million new jobs, the biggest budget surplus in history, and millionaires did pretty good, too.”

Obama had found a way to capitalize on an unusual political development. In an effort to sell deficit reduction, many Republicans have been extolling the former President’s legacy. Even Mitt Romney has presented Clinton as a responsible centrist and a champion of welfare reform, unlike Obama. “Almost a generation ago, Bill Clinton announced that the era of big government was over,” Romney said earlier this year, trying to magnify divisions between the two Presidents. “President Obama tucked away the Clinton doctrine in his large drawer of discarded ideas, along with transparency and bipartisanship. It’s enough to make you wonder if maybe it was a personal beef with the Clintons, but really it runs much deeper.”

Former Representative Anthony Weiner, whose wife, Huma Abedin, is a top aide to Hillary Clinton, expressed surprise that the G.O.P. has conceded this ground. “Swing voters volunteer that under Clinton we had a big surplus,” he said. “So Clinton provides this perfect signpost in history for Obama. What’s fascinating to me is that the Republicans have seen it coming, understand it, and basically stipulate it. It’s one of those interesting moments when both sides aren’t fighting about whether it’s true.”

On April 29th of this year, Obama attended the first of the joint fund-raisers, in suburban Virginia, at the home of Clinton’s good friend Terry McAuliffe. The event had the feel of a first date. “If it were an indie movie,” a former Clinton aide said, “the premise would have been these two guys are set up to go out and all their friends are there trying to see if they hit it off or not.” As Obama stood on a stage in the back yard with Clinton and McAuliffe, waiting to be introduced, he looked uneasy, with his arms crossed and his head occasionally down. “You could just tell he felt like ‘Wow, I’m in the belly of the Clinton beast—Terry McAuliffe’s house!’ ” the former aide said. “If I had to put a thought bubble above Obama’s head while Clinton spoke, it would be ‘What’s he going to say?’ ”

Clinton started his remarks with a humorous appreciation of McAuliffe, a fervid Democratic partisan. “I love poor Terry McAuliffe,” Clinton said. “He’s so laid back and repressed; he just can’t express himself. I worry about him. But, I tell you what, if we had a hundred more like him we wouldn’t lose as many elections.” When it came to Obama, Clinton had some facts to convey. He told the donors that he hoped they would remember them and pass them along to their friends. That it takes ten years to recover from a financial crisis rooted in a housing collapse, and, by that historical standard, Obama was “beating the clock, not behind it.” That Obama’s stimulus plan had shaved two points off the unemployment rate. That Obama’s restructuring of the auto industry had saved one and a half million jobs. That Obama’s health-care law will bring consumers and employers $1.3 billion in refunds from insurance companies.

Clinton seemed at home. Obama looked coiled and reticent when he stepped forward. “Let me just say this—and I think Bill will agree with me,” he said, near the end of his speech. “There’s nothing more humbling, actually, than being President. It’s a strange thing. Suddenly, you’ve got all the pomp and the circumstance and you’ve got the helicopters and you’ve got the Air Force One and—and the plane is really nice. It really is. I mean, Bill may not miss being President, but he misses that plane. Let’s face it, he does. It’s a great plane. And I’ll miss it, too.” A voice from the audience of donors suddenly interrupted the President: “But not yet!” Obama paused briefly. “But not yet,” he replied, with a smile. The crowd cheered and the tension in the yard finally seemed to lift.

On June 7th, Messina went to a meeting in Chicago of the Clinton Global Initiative to make another presentation. Clinton and Messina engaged in a detailed discussion of the politics of swing states. “We talked about each one of them in depth,” Messina said. “And he has a history in all of them. It was amazing. He knew counties, he knew media markets. This is a guy who has won two Presidential elections.”

There was a price for Clinton’s general involvement. At the end of 2011, Hillary Clinton still had a quarter of a million dollars in campaign debt left from 2008. Obama had agreed to retire it, in order to secure her endorsement after the primary contest ended; he had to make good on that promise. Eventually, Matthew Barzun, Obama’s national finance chair and a former Ambassador to Sweden, raised the money, but it was a scramble—“a logistical challenge,” one Democrat told me—to drum up donors amid the Obama campaign’s own efforts to raise money. On July 25th, Obama, who was flying back from New Orleans, called Clinton, in Boston, and asked him to speak during prime time at the Convention, in Charlotte.

The quasi-friendship between Clinton and Obama resembles the transactional relationship between most living Presidents. People in Clinton’s orbit portray his campaign work for Obama as that of a man going through the motions—speeches, photographs, rope lines.

Obama’s circle offers a more diplomatic assessment. “Clinton still believes that Obama doesn’t take care of his donors as he should,” a senior Obama official said, referring to Obama’s reluctance to woo his biggest financial supporters. Yet, the official added, “Clinton has a lot of respect for how honest and how supportive the President has been to his wife.” Obama’s success with health-care reform, which the Clintons failed to achieve, also resonates. “Health care means a lot to all three of those people—Hillary, Bill, and Barack,” the official said. “I think historic achievements matter to historic figures like Bill Clinton.”

As a Democratic President facing a resurgent conservative movement, Obama doubtless has come to appreciate what he once criticized as Clinton’s focus on seemingly minor issues, such as advocating for school uniforms in public schools. Although Obama once scoffed at Clinton for his small-bore initiatives, more recently, according to White House officials, he has come to realize that when a President doesn’t control Congress he must find solace in the often limited powers of his office.

With many of Obama’s senior political advisers—Axelrod, Messina, Robert Gibbs, Stephanie Cutter, Ben LaBolt—now in Chicago working on his reëlection campaign, the Administration in Washington has taken on the aura of a Clinton alumni association. Obama’s chief of staff, Jacob Lew, and his main economic adviser, Gene Sperling, were top Clinton aides. Bruce Reed, formerly Clinton’s chief domestic-policy adviser, and Steve Ricchetti, Clinton’s deputy chief of staff, now work at the White House, as Biden’s chief of staff and counsellor, respectively. The three top Obama Cabinet positions are held by Clinton veterans: Secretary of State Clinton, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta. It’s only a slight exaggeration to say that the many staffing changes since 2010 have resulted in the Obama camp running the campaign while the Clinton camp runs the government.

Given the political stalemate in Washington and the anemic economy, turning the campaign into a choice between the Bush years and the Clinton years makes strategic sense. And, after constant complaints by Republicans, Obama has finally stopped blaming Bush for the poor economy. Clinton can do that work instead. Embraced by both parties, he is better equipped than Obama to make the case that Bush squandered the good fortune and budget surpluses of the nineteen-nineties and left the current President with multiple crises to clean up.

For Clinton, the politics are more complicated. His associates take it as a given that he would like nothing more than to see his wife become President. Hillary Clinton will step down as Secretary of State after the campaign and begin the process of deciding whether she will run in 2016. By some measures, a defeat for Obama in November would leave Hillary the undisputed leader of her party and propel her toward the Oval Office that much faster. At least one of Clinton’s closest advisers seems to be backing that strategy. According to two people with direct knowledge, Douglas Band has said that he will vote for Romney. Band declined to comment.

Now that Obama has turned the campaign into something of a referendum on Clinton’s sterling record on the economy, Clinton can hardly complain. That may be part of Obama’s strategy, too. Flattered by the attention, Clinton now has an incentive to work hard for Obama, who seems to have learned how to tame the former President. “In many ways, the President has been using Bill Clinton as an economic role model,” the senior official said. “I would guess that President Clinton views that as a compliment.” ♦

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